Beside your body wholly surrendered to mine, beside your smooth shoulders where the ways of your embrace are born, where are born your voice and glance, remote and clear, I suddenly sensed the infinite hollow of his absence. All these years that I miss him so, like a climbing vine that clings from the wind, I've sensed that he comes and goes with each contact, and everyday I eagerly tear a message that holds nothing but a date, and his name grandly grows, every time vibrating more profoundly, because his voice was only for my ears, because my eyes went blind when his were gone, and my soul is like a huge desolate temple. But this body of yours is a foreign god, forged out of memories, reflection of myself, soft from my smoothness, glorious from my desires, a masque statue I've raised in his memory.

Today your eyes have lost the stars they wore And I am shipwrecked too and wan with waves Who swim out unto your body’s far shore Where my own voice can call the name I bore, Where there is gold and azure, day that’s new, Grainlike and ripe, perfected, silent too.

In you my solitude once more seeks grace— In thought of you! This swift change which seeps o’er, some muted passion which your glances wore Have touched with fiercer fire my life a space.

Fast-fleeting, far, far foam—seaweed—my kiss Could worlds create again across your eyes! Naked the shore there, lone, but rich for bliss, And back the stars would blaze where bleakness lies.

A flower—and made to bloom for ruin vainly! A world of joy and dead by fate’s decree? My gift—all fruit-ripe, grain—rich things to be Which bitter suns like yours seek surely.

This intense perfume of your flesh is nothing more than the world which the blue spheres of your eyes move and displace, nothing more than the earth and the blue rivers of veins imprisoned in your arms. In your anguished kiss are all the round oranges you sacrificed on the edge of a garden where life for all time to come broke off from mine. So remote was the endless air that filled our breasts. I pulled you from the earth by the drunken roots of your hands, and entire I drank you down, oh perfect delicious fruit! Forever now when the sun touches me I must feel the rude contact of your flesh born in the freshness of an unexpected dawn, nourished in the caress of rivers as pure and clear as your embrace, sweetened in the afternoon wind that comes down from the mountains to join your breath and ripened in the sun of your eighteen years, warm for me who awaited it.This intense perfume of your flesh

You, myself, dry like a defeated wind which only for a moment could hold in its arms the leaf it wrenched from the trees, how is it possible that nothing can move you now, that no rain can crush you, no sun give back your weariness? To be a purposeless transparency above the limpid lakes of your gaze, oh tempest, oh deluge of long ago! If since then I seek an image of you that was mine alone, if within my sterile hands I stifled the last drop of your blood and my tears, if since then the world has been indifferent, in wastelands endless, and each new night has grown like moss over the memory of your embrace, how then in the new day can I have any breath but yours, any but your impalpable arms among mine?

I weep like a mother who has replaced her only dead son. I weep like the earth which twice has felt the same perfect fruit sprout with it. I weep because you were destined to be my grief and already now it is in the past that I belong to you.

My only love and so wholly mine Making desirable my days, How well we both know what absence is Since the flesh hinders us so always! My hands to be sure have forgotten you But my eyes can see you as I tell, Whenever the world grows bitter for me I shut them both then I see you well. I never want to meet you again Who are with me always, I do not care How I shatter to pieces life which is yours Which for me weaves this dream so fair. Just as one day you said to me that it is your living image I own, Because daily I wash my eyes With the tears wherein your memory shone. One went away but it was not you, My love whom the silences can claim, If my two arms even and my mouth Went away with the words the name. This is not I, the other it is Silent as usual but lasting for aye, Just like this love so wholly mine Which will go on with me till I die.

Those of us who have hands that don’t belong to us,too grotesque for a caress, useless for the workroom or the hoe,long and flaccid like a flower bereaved of seedor like a reptile that offers up its venombecause it has nothing else to give.Those of us who have a guilty or embittered lookfrom which the unfinished death of the world peers outand which glows a smile that freezes before the naked statuesbecause it will never close itself around gold ringsor give itself over like a torch over the horizons of timeon a night whose dawn is but this noonthat flagellates our skins at times ripped out forever.

Those of us who have rolled through the ages like a rock broken off from Genesisover the grass or among the undergrowth in unbridled rushto remain unstoppable and never go back to what we werewhile men ascend with difficultyand sprout other hands from their own to bend the direction of the windsor to weave themselves tenderly.

Those of us who dress bodies with old suits,for whom theft is enough or the alms of a crumb that is all bread and only Host,we have arrived at the shores of the centuries that go by our anguished heartsand we will never see with clean eyesanother day like this one when all the music in the universebecomes a voice that doesn’t listen to anyone among the empty wordsand in the dream without water.

The little new-born death which comes each night Wherein with consciousness for the one light We lie stretched out beside our books Whence flightless words by my hand vexed escape, Within this family crypt In which mirrored in every glass, in every place, lies evidence of crime, Even in whose wardrobes closed, dwells chrysalis of old farewells made frail, With which we drench deathlessly days to come, In all pendants aswing from all the lights, With in the poison of each cup we drain, In this electric-chair where our disguise of day we fling by night, To swathe our lonely self in white graveclothes, All my poor heart can do is to mark time Or like a circus tiger pace my pen Raging for liberty. Unto our graves now all of us have gone And in good time and properly, In ambulances costly, convening, To death gone naturally or by our will. Alone I can not carry on the play, and perfectly, With only the lone moon important in its part, Because now Trains are everywhere To fling their sorrow-cries abroad And then go on. All the moon can do is shine With little fireflies which keep watch too, From that vast azure near and yet unknown And filled with stars countless and polyglot.

I gave to a song my grief for the loss of you! I must wash my eyes of the eyes of you— Twin pharos prolonging my sad shipwreck. I must seize back life which your hands destroyed,— Naught but mist perhaps, swirling, frail, and adrift, Of ephemeral wings of the wind the rack… Give me back my night again, black, voiceless, Naked and stripped of dream-joys with you! The dawn I love no more now, reckless of day Which finds us still alien... still far away.